The Duality Bridge (Singularity #2) (Singularity Series)

by Susan Kaye Quinn

  I stumble back and sink to the floor, curled up, legs tucked, fists to forehead.

  Think, Eli. I beat my bloodied fists on my head. But I can’t think: I’m nothing but rage and pain and guilt inside skin that feels too loose. I force myself to try anyway. I go back over everything and try to piece together what’s happened. There has to be some way out that I’m missing, some fix for all of this.

  Augustus took the camp. Someone betrayed us, and he swarmed in with a hundred sentries, looking for me hidden away amongst the human members of the Resistance.

  Augustus let Lenora go. He wanted her to bring me in. She tried to flee, but I convinced her to steal his key instead. When we returned to his mind, mere minutes later, he was already waiting for her with a trap.

  Augustus knew. He knew we were coming—he must have sensed my presence when I was there the first time. That moment when I stole his key, I must have left something behind. A ghost of my presence? Or just the awareness that something had been there? Either way, he knew his consciousness, or cognition, or whatever Leopold called it had been breached—and he was ready when we returned.

  Did he know it was me? Lenora claimed that somehow, when I came into the “full expression” of my power, whatever that meant, that I would live forever. If Augustus knows I stole his personal key, I can’t imagine him letting me live for more than ten seconds.

  Why am I still alive?

  My head lifts, and clarity comes to me: Augustus wants something from me.

  There’s some purpose I still serve for him. Something I can do only if I’m alive. He’s already disgraced me with the Resistance. He already has everyone and everything I hold dear locked up in his cells. He’s thoroughly scrubbed their minds, which means he knows everything they know about me—

  Cyrus’s memories. And now possibly Lenora’s, too.

  Augustus knows everything about the fugue. He has to. Even if Lenora’s personal key somehow stays intact—and it would take time to break it—Augustus has to have figured out I was the one who touched his mind. That I stole his key. Which means he’s keeping me alive so he can figure out how that works. And if he does… my mind boggles at the idea of Augustus having that kind of power.

  My cell door slides open.

  The sentry has returned for me.

  I can’t let Augustus control the fugue.

  If it means I have to go into the void and never come back, so be it. If it means being blown apart, the bits of myself scattered into the gray, fine. Besides, if I’m dead and gone or useless in some way, he’ll have no reason to torture people. He might just kill the Resistance members instead—it’s probably wishful thinking that he would just let them go—but Lenora keeps saying Orion doesn’t take the Resistance or the rebel ascenders seriously. Maybe all Augustus really cares about is me, and they were just a means to the end of hunting me down. Augustus seems like the type who’s used to taking what he wants regardless of the cost. The kind that would be unimaginably dangerous with the power inherent in the fugue state.

  The sentry’s heavy steps and slight mechanical rustlings echo in the long hall. We traverse two more locked doors, then march down another hallway. This place is immense, just as I saw in my vision. Finally, I’m ushered into a room that’s empty except for a chair with blue gel cushions, reclined slightly. It’s way too familiar. The sentry leaves, no doubt locking me in, but I’m in no hurry to take a seat.

  I pace the edges of the room, a physical repetition that isn’t just aimed at dispelling the anxiety that’s ramping up throughout my body: I’m trying to calm my mind. If I can relax enough to get into the fugue, maybe I can find a way out of this.

  I don’t make much progress before the door flickers open.

  I expect Augustus to be paying me a visit, but it’s a female ascender instead. She has the same power-uniform—form-fitting over her slim curves. Her skin is neutral gray with touches of silver scintillating underneath, which is odd—I’ve never seen a mix like that before.

  “Hello, Eli.” Her voice is cold and clinical. I get the feeling she would dissect me before I was dead and not a whisper of emotion would flash across her gray skin.

  “Who are you?” I ask.

  She flits across the room with ascender speed. I have to turn to face her again.

  She gestures to the chair. “Please have a seat.”

  “Do I have a choice?” I fold my arms.

  “No.” She stares at me, motionless in that way ascenders sometimes are.

  I wait a beat, but I know it’s useless to resist. Still, I drag my boots as I cross the floor. The gel cushions are chilled, and I give an involuntary shudder as they lock onto the length of my body. My heart lurches as a matrix of blue light springs to life around me, encasing me in a net-like holo cocoon from head to foot. It pulses, and a wave of blue travels up and down my body. I have to close my eyes when it passes my face—the light is blinding, but I don’t feel anything yet.

  “What is this?” I ask through clenched teeth, even though I know—it’s the same blue matrix from my mother’s memories, still fresh in my mind along with her feeling of terror as they invaded her thoughts and dredged her memories. I push that aside and try to suck in air to calm my raging heartbeat. I have to resist this somehow. I can’t let Augustus crack open my skull and look inside.

  He might learn things even I don’t know. A full-body shudder grips me, and the cushions pull against it.

  “Resisting the probe will only cause you more pain.” Her dispassionate voice trickles icy drops of fear through my skin and into my chest. I beat back the panic by thinking about my mom: she gracefully faced the cancer eating away at her. She stared her own death in the face and accepted it with calm. Maybe it was her faith—believing she had a soul and an afterlife—that gave her the mental strength not to break down into sobs like I would have. I don’t know. But I’ll borrow anything right now to fight off Augustus’s cool mind-probing assistant.

  The matrix stops its scan and slowly brightens until I have to squint against it. The light somehow feels like a hundred ants crawling over my skin, gathering speed and burrowing in. I can’t help letting out a sound of disgust and horror. My body convulses against it, but the gel of the cushion holds me firm. Finally, I’m forced to close my eyes against the glare. The sensation of things under my skin rushes up my neck. I grimace against it, but it’s plunging inside my head…

  ...my mother thrashes against the chair. I’m simultaneously her and not her. I’m reliving the memory scour she endured, the deep probing for anything related to me, while at the same time, I have that immutable feeling again, like this has already happened and cannot change. I’m observing it from a distance afforded by separation of time, like when I was in the zealot’s cell, watching him being forced to take the neural implant. I slowly realize I’m not just remembering… I’m in the fugue.

  Which means I shouldn’t be bound to the chair.

  That thought moves me quickly to the door. I’m standing now, looking back at my body gripped by the cushions with my ascender tormentor hovering over me. She seems slightly panicked, rapidly passing her hands as well as a small silver instrument over the blue matrix that’s enmeshing my body. The body in the chair has gone still, even as my mother’s memories play in the distance. They’re a shield, thrown up to protect my mind from the probe.

  If I’m in the fugue… maybe I can somehow control Augustus’s assistant, stop the probe, or even find a way out of here. These thoughts draw me toward her.

  I shove my hand into her head.

  A flood of information fills me for a split second—then I’m blasted away. The room dissolves, falling into mist, and I’m blown into the grayness. I float in it, disoriented again. Panic nibbles at the edge of my mind, but maybe this is better after all. The shield of my mother’s memories wouldn’t hold forever. Eventually, Augustus’s assistant would find a way to break through. It’s better for me to be out here in the void, safe from their reach.

&n
bsp; The bits and pieces of my mind float alongside me. I idly poke at them. Some are new. Like the fact that the ascender tormenting me is Augustus’s second. Her name is Hypatia. She’s more than his second—she’s a sort of partner in their plans. He’s promised her so much—

  Something tugs at me.

  The pieces pull toward one another, like a center of gravity has formed in the middle of me.

  Something tugs again, harder—

  My entire body seizes up, arching like I’m being electrocuted, then I slam back down into the chair. The holo net is gone, my lungs fight for air, and Hypatia has two hands to my chest, shoving aside my loose shirt to touch my bare skin with her ice-cold palms. I stare up at her with wild eyes, gasping to get enough oxygen. She backs off immediately, hands flying up, eyes hard on me—then she hovers her hands over my body, moving them rapidly. She’s scanning me like a med bot.

  I recover my wits enough to say, “Looking for something, Hypatia?”

  She freezes then takes a half step back. I take advantage of that to test my restraints—the cushions have relaxed their grip. I can sit up in the chair, although my body is cramping—probably due to the shock Hypatia used to bring me back, as much as being in the void itself.

  “Yes, I know who you are,” I say, just to keep her off-kilter. The after-effects make my words a little jittery, but they’re clear enough. I scan my memories, the bits I picked up from her. I have her personal key, but that doesn’t do me any good—I don’t know how to use it. Still… “Why is Augustus sending his second in here to probe my mind? Too busy conquering the world to attend to it himself?”

  Her eyes go even wider, then she moves like lightning. I don’t see what she’s done, I just feel the tap on my chest. My chin sinks down, my head impossibly heavy, and just before whatever she’s done knocks me out, I see the thin, silver med patch floating above my skin.

  I pitch forward, and the world goes black.

  The ground is broken with thirst. My boots crush the dirt into dust. I look up. The barren landscape stretches for miles beneath a storm-laden sky. The horizon boils with clouds, a wall of them, laced with fire and lightning and death.

  I’ve been here before.

  Kamali appears in front of me, solemn-faced. Her beautiful hair whips in the heated breeze.

  “It’s coming,” I warn her. My body transports to her side. I grip her shoulders and stare into her infinitely deep eyes. They are made of star dust and wisdom. “We have to stop it,” I say to her, but what I really mean is, we have to leave. Run away. Because the firestorm is too immense, too powerful, too much for anyone to stop.

  She turns her head to the side and whispers, “Death comes to every body.” She says the words separately—every and body, as if there’s a multitude of bodies in the path of the storm, and it will lay waste to every single one of them. As I think it, so it is—the cracked earth teems with them, barefoot and wandering, lost in the desert. None of them see the storm as it rolls silently across the parched ground, consuming everything in its path. Every body. The screams rise and fall as the storm picks up the forgotten and consumes them.

  I edge around Kamali to stand back-to-back, facing the storm and putting myself between her and its hungry maw.

  “How do I stop it?” I yell over my shoulder to her. The winds are whipping my words from my mouth and carrying them away with the screams of the dying.

  She doesn’t answer.

  I face the storm and hold out my hands, palms against the raging clouds, as if I can stop the coming death with my will alone. I remember my mother and Lenora in a similar stance, trying to hold it off.

  They were swallowed.

  I lower my hands. “I can’t stop it.”

  “You were our bridge,” Kamali says, her voice dead, like she knows it’s hopeless, too.

  I turn to her, but she’s gone. All the bodies, walking the parched earth and rising into the fiery cloud, have disappeared. It’s just me and the storm now. It crawls across the ground, slow and inexorable, as unstoppable and deadly as an avalanche. It will take me, too, and it’s only right.

  Because I failed them all. Every single one.

  I spread my arms wide to embrace the fiery breath of my fate—

  I awake like I’m drowning—gasping for air and flailing.

  I fall off something soft and land on something very hard. With my face. I’m stunned out of air again, make a horrible noise as air refuses to enter my lungs, then an even worse one when it does. I lift my face from the cold ascender-tech flooring and blink rapidly. I’m dazed, but now that I’m breathing again, I hazard a look around.

  Hypatia stands over me, coolly taking in my human sputtering and spittle on the floor. I scuttle away from her, taking stock of where I am and what’s happening. I’m back in my cell. There’s a bed in it now, risen from the floor, and I’ve just fallen out. I check my chest: the med patch is still there, no doubt what she used to put me out. And probably to wake me up again. I snatch it away from my skin and throw it across the room.

  She doesn’t move.

  “How long have I been out?” I crawl backward to the wall with hands and feet, then work at bracing myself to standing. Despite waking up as if I’m dying, I feel okay: no shakes. No fugue after-effects. The vision must have been just that—or a dream. I’m woozy yet refreshed, like after a long, hard sleep: probably the effect of whatever she used to knock me out. Or maybe I’ve been out a long time.

  She’s not answering me.

  “Not very talkative, are you, Hypatia?”

  She doesn’t react, at least not visibly. Her skin is still that glistening gray, no color, but not static either. There’s a glint that subtly travels, like a sparkling accent that can’t choose her best feature. And she is beautiful, like all ascenders. But for all Marcus’s arrogance, and Augustus’s obvious disdain for the lesser being that I am, Hypatia looks at me the way a scientist examines a frog just before cutting out its heart.

  Maybe I shouldn’t tempt her to do that quite so much.

  Now that I’m standing, she says, “Please come with me.”

  I don’t ask if I have a choice.

  She leads me out of my cell and down the hall. I recognize the path—we’re heading back to the room with the mind-probing chair. I’m a lot more calm this time, so I take quiet deep breaths to settle my body even further. The mind-probe tripped me into the fugue before, but only because my mother’s memories protected me. I don’t know if that will work again, and besides, it would be better to control it myself. Get in the fugue state, move out of the room, and find some way to get everyone out. Maybe intercept a data stream. Or convince someone to free us. If I can find Leopold, he can help me use Hypatia’s key.

  Anything but staying under her mind probe for any length of time.

  We reach the door of the room, and the calm settles into my bones. I can do this; I’ll talk myself into the fugue once I’m in the chair. The door winks open, but instead of an empty room, the Dalai Lama sits cross-legged on the floor, meditating. He’s scrawny, like the fourteen-year-old he is, and draped in a bright orange robe. A sentry stands just inside the door.

  The Dalai opens his eyes as we cross the threshold. He smiles wide when he sees me. “Eli!” He gracefully unfolds and rises from the floor.

  “Your Holiness.” I can’t believe how good it is to see him, even with the dark circles under his eyes.

  A realization comes across his face and dulls his bright smile. “I saw you come in the door,” he says in one long breath. Something flashes in the room, and his entire body jerks, his face contorting with pain.

  Then he drops to the floor.

  I don’t understand what’s happening at all… until I see the massive hole burned clean through his midsection. The look of pain on his face relaxes into a peaceful stare, but his eyes remain open, unblinking.

  “What,” I gasp and lunge over to him. I kneel down, my hands shaking, trembling with inarticulate rage. “Why?” It’s a
whisper leaking out of me. My eyes burn as I reach for him, but there’s nothing I can do. Nothing anyone could do. I use my shaking fingers to close his eyes instead. Something warm and wet nudges my knee. I stare dumbly at the growing pool of his blood.

  Anger jolts me upright. “Why did you do this?” I screech. The words carve out my heart. My shaking fists want to pummel something, but I can’t. The sentry stands, weapon raised, ready to punch a hole in me next. Hypatia coolly examines me from the door, then steps around the body and blood and life snuffed out on the floor like it’s nothing.

  Nothing.

  I fight through the red haze of anger and guilt. This is for me. This was done for me. I don’t need Hypatia to tell me, but when I slowly turn to face her, she does anyway.

  “You will not block our efforts to access your mind,” she says as if there were any doubt. “For every failed attempt, another member of the Resistance will die.”

  I can’t speak, but I nod very slowly.

  “Please have a seat.”

  I take a step and nearly go down, slipping on the Dalai Lama’s blood. My stomach is in full rebellion. I’m convinced I’m going to be sick before I reach the chair.

  I’ve lost. I’ve completely lost.

  I manage to get into the mind-probe chair without throwing up.

  I’m still twitching from the shock. Still numb from the sight of the Dalai Lama’s body lifeless on the floor. Hypatia stands next to the chair, impassive while the sentry trains his weapon on me from the door.

  It’s over.

  There’s no way I can watch them parade the entire Resistance past me, punching light-weapon holes through them until I comply. I can’t. I have to give Hypatia what she wants, even if it means… what? I don’t know anymore. Access to the fugue? A bridge to an alternate plane of existence?

  Access to the personal keys of every ascender.

  A shudder runs through me that has nothing to do with the cool gel cushions clamping onto my body. The holo field activates a cocoon of blue light that hums energy around me. The creeping sensation of ants on my skin starts immediately this time, and I’ve only got moments to decide—if there’s even a decision to make. Do I resist and watch people die? Or do I hand Augustus a vast power that I’m barely beginning to understand?